There are ever increasing demands for compounds useful in epoxy resin applications, for example as emulsifiers or diluents, as epoxy resins are required to perform under ever more specific and demanding conditions. For epoxy resin applications it is desirable for such a compound to have epoxy functional groups to increase the compatibility with the cured epoxy matrix. Further, it is desirable to be able to provide compounds with predefined hydrophilic and hydrophobic segments depending on the desired applications. Therefore it is desirable to provide a novel process that can control the hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties of the compounds.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide novel epoxy-functional hydroxy esters. It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel process to prepare epoxy-functional hydroxy esters.